The Churches Pulled Down

All these things were indeed fulfilled in our day, when we saw with our own eyes the houses of prayer thrown down from top to bottom, foundations and all, and the inspired and holy Scriptures handed over to the fire in the middle of the marketplaces; when we saw the shepherds of the churches shamefully hiding here and there, and some of them disgracefully captured and mocked by their enemies. Then too, as another prophetic word says, “Contempt was poured out on rulers, and he made them wander in a trackless place, where there is no road.” [a] But it is not for us to describe the grim disasters that came upon them in the end, just as it is not fitting for us to hand down to memory their dissensions with one another and their misconduct before the persecution. That is why we have decided to relate nothing more about them than what may show the divine judgment to be just. So we have not been led to make any mention of those who were put to the test by the persecution, or of those who made complete shipwreck of their salvation and, by their own choice, were flung into the depths of the surge. We will add to our general history only those things that may be of benefit, first to ourselves, and then to those who come after us. Let us go on, then, from here, to describe in brief the sacred contests of the martyrs of the divine word. [b]

It was the nineteenth year of Diocletian’s reign, in the month Dystrus, which the Romans would call March, and the feast of the Savior’s suffering was coming on, when imperial letters were posted up everywhere. They ordered the churches to be leveled to the ground and the Scriptures to be destroyed by fire, and they proclaimed that those who held positions of honor should lose their rank, and that those in households, if they held to their profession of Christianity, should be deprived of their freedom. [d] Such was the first decree against us. But not long afterward other letters arrived, ordering that the heads of the churches everywhere should all be put in chains first, and then afterward be forced by every means to sacrifice. [g]